Adaptive and power-aware mechanism in wireless sensor networks

In a very short time, the interest about Wireless Sensors Networks(WSN) and their applications has grown both within the academic community and in the industry. At the same time, the complexity of the envisaged WSN-based systems has grown from a handful of homogeneous sensors to hundreds or thousands of devices, possibly differing in terms of capability, architecture, and operating system. Recently, some deployments of WSNs have been suggested in the literature both addressing the energy-aware and the adaptability to environmental changes issues; in both cases limitations arise which either prevent a long lifetime or/and the Quality of Service(QoS) of the envisaged applications.Energy is one of the scarcest resources in WSNs; energy harvesting technologies are thus required to design credible autonomous sensor networks. In addition to energy harvesting technologies, energy saving mechanisms play an important role to reduce energy consumption in sensor nodes. Moreover, in wireless sensor networks, the network topology may change over time due to permanent or transient node and communication faults, energy availability for the nodes (despite thepossible presence of energy harvesting mechanisms) and environmental changes (e.g., a landslide phenomenon, solar powerdensity made available to the nodes, presence of vegetation subject to seasonal dynamics). Development of smart routing algorithms is hence a must for granting effective communications in large scale wireless networks with adaptation ability combined with energy-aware aspects.